Luck and more luck

Today I had a bit of an adventure, I went out to New Territories to visit the Yuen Yuen institute. New Territories refers to a massive area north of Kowloon that was acquired by the British a little later than the rest of the city, hence the 'new'. Which is funny, since most of New Territories is actually older, since it didn't develop at the same time as Hong Kong island and Kowloon. Anyway, I had to take a minibus there, which is this tiny little 16 seat bus that makes crazy turns and dodges all over the place. Very fun. I checked out Western Monastery, which is just down the road first, but Yuen Yuen was definitely where it was at. It houses a shrine for all of the 60 calendar gods of Taoism, and was founded as a place to unite Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. I found some good examples, although none of them were very old since the site only dates from the 50's, still it was interesting. On a personal note, I found the god of the year of my birthday, he looked very friendly (some of them were quite demonic-looking and one had a bunny hat on, very awesome.) I also checked out the Zodiac chart. Turns out every so often your zodiac sign is in conflict with the zodiac sign of the year and you have very bad luck. Last year was my year. I know its easy to predict the past, but saying the gods were against me explains a few things. Anywho, apparently next year is looking to be very auspicious, and I'm being helped along by a jade dragon to attract more good luck (specifically the dragon, things would have gone poorly, the zodiac lady explained to me, if I had gotten something like a monkey necklace, ok). Either way, it was only seven bucks, and how many souvenirs can offer a prosperous new year?

I got a late start, and Yuen Yuen was a trek, so by the time I got back to Central, I had lost the light. I checked out Man Mo temple, one of the oldest in the city, but at this point the temples are all starting to look the same. I was hoping to use the bamboo sticks to tell my fortune, but I found out all the explanations are in Chinese, so I guess I saved something there.

Part of me really likes the practicality of Taoism. At the temple, people were buring giant piles of papers with prayers and offerings on them, as well as leaving incense, peanuts and oranges to the gods. I like the idea that you can try to control your luck, and if things don't work out, you can go back and ask for more, leave bribes or try changing what you're wearing. If you have the extra money, it seems a lot more appealing than Christianity telling you when bad things happen that either you did something to deserve it, or you're just not believing hard enough, like that's something you can control. Here, the gods are petty, but they're fairly easy to appease.

No pictures for now, but I'll get to it later.